Taming Data: Lauren Kirchner reports onanother free and easy tool available for journalists who want to quickly map a slew of data: either to simply illustrate the data for readers, or to look for patterns in that data to find an angle for a story: OpenHeatMap.

Solving Sarah: Robert Draper, the prolific political reporter, has a 7,720-word piece on Sarah Palin in this weekend’s New York Times magazine, which, as per tradition, was published in preview online. Joel Meares has a report on what the piece says about Palin and the press.

Social Security in the Heartland: Jim Bean, 50, is a rigger—the person who climbs up to the ceiling in theaters and entertainment centers to hang the lights and the sound equipment. In the latest of Trudy Lieberman’s series of pieces about how Social Security reform could affect ordinary Americans, Bean talks about his hopes and fears about retirement.